The late great Michael Crichton placed Jurassic Park on a tropical island, but CBS programming execs showed signs that they seized the thing and replanted it in 60 Minutes. As proof, the show welcomed the new year with the fossil discovery of . . . Paul Ehrlich. Yep, the Stanford prof and dinosaur is still alive and vigorous at age 90, alive enough to push his signature doomsaying, and 60 Minutes obliged by trotting him out (see below).
What’s with Stanford University? They seem to be a hotbed for the kind of kooks who are frocked in PhD’s and flock to the limelight like a moth to a porch light. It’s a tradition at Stanford. Remember William Shockley, the engineer and Nobel Prize-winning co-inventor of the transistor and inveterate purveyor of racialist mumbo jumbo? Well, move over Shockley to make room for Ehrlich and colleagues like Tony Barnosky. Science is their vocation and doom is their game. Chicken Little has nothing on these folks.
But they’re scientists, right? They ought to know, right? Yes, they ought to, but don’t. They represent a peculiar species of scientist who pushes science beyond its capacities and right into divination. They take a slice of present data, conjure a trend, and then laser-like project it into the future. No understanding of history; no understanding of mitigating circumstances. Based on the results, their soothsaying is no more accurate, maybe less so, than bibliomancy – the practice of closing one’s eyes, randomly opening a book to a page, and pointing the index finger to a line of verse to extract the future.
In the past, Ehrlich predicted an earth suffocating under the weight of 4 billion souls (earth’s population in the 1960’s), mass starvation, resource exhaustion, and ecological collapse. Now, the siren song is mass species extinction under 8 billion souls. His misses are many and include the famous 1980 lost bet with U. of Maryland economist Julian Simon. Ehrlich chose five industrial metals and bet that their price would be higher in ten years, expecting the subsequent shortages would lead to price increases. He lost. You see, Ehrlich probably wouldn’t make for a good economist. Ehrlich is blind to financier Henry Clews’s insight in 1918 when Clews wrote “the best cure for high prices is high prices”: prices go up, efficiencies increase, new sources discovered, and prices drop. For Ehrlich, mitigations be damned, adjustments be damned, and full speed to the apocalypse.
Human capital doesn’t exist in Ehrlich’s mind. We’re only animals eating up everything that we can get our hands on. Yet, human beings change their circumstances with innovations. As a consequence, more food is produced with greater efficiency, wealth increases, fertility declines, urbanization intensifies, and pressure on the wildlands decreases. So much for the alleged cataclysm of mass extinction. People like Ehrlich are chronically wrong.
Interestingly, the same 60 Minutes chart of past mass extinctions also shows a recovery afterwards. And the recovery was hundreds of thousands of years before Lenin’s invention of central planning. No need for technocrats like Ehrlich and Barnosky to herd the masses back into the Middle Ages to avoid these shamans’ predictions of doom.
Ehrlich and his sidekick Barnosky are programmed to fail in their prognostications. The problem is entrenched is their reliance on a loose extrapolation from a large area to a smaller one (see below). The data can also be fraught with hypotheticals in interpretation. Out of the conjury comes hair-on-fire Armageddons that turn out to be wrong. We are constantly afflicted with it in everything from plastics to the end of the world in climate change. We are kept on the edge of our seats in a pass-the-baton series of dooms.
60 Minutes’s resurrection of the fossil Ehrlich proves that hysteria is a natural feature of the human condition, and the barkers will always have a place at the table. Ironically, progressives pride themselves in their alleged immunity to it and see themselves at war with it, while they are preoccupied with it. They are the chief purveyors. Self-delusion has no bounds.
RogerG
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* “60 Minutes Promotes Paul Ehrlich’s Failed Doomsaying One More Time”, Ronald Bailey, Reason, 1/3/23, at https://reason.com/2023/01/03/60-minutes-promotes-paul-ehrlichs-failed-doomsaying-one-more-time/
* “Paul Ehrlich: Wrong on 60 Minutes and for Almost 60 Years”, Peter Jacobsen, Foundation for Economic Education, 1/4/23, at https://fee.org/articles/paul-ehrlich-wrong-on-60-minutes-and-for-almost-60-years/
* The reason for the error in Ehrlich and Barnosky’s predictions can be understood by reading “Species–area relationships always overestimate extinction rates from habitat loss”, Fangliang He and Stephen P. Hubbell, Nature, 5/18/2011, at https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09985